We review some recent studies on the string model of confinement inspired by the strong-coupling regime of QCD and its application to exotic multiquark configurations. This includes two quarks and two antiquarks, four quarks and one antiquark, six qu
arks, and three quarks and three antiquarks with a careful treatment of the corresponding few-body problem.
Many new states in the charmonium and bottomonium mass region were recently discovered by the BaBar, Belle and CDF Collaborations. We use the QCD Sum Rule approach to study the possible structure of some of these states. In particular we identify the
recently observed bottomonium-like resonance $Z_b^+(10610)$ with the first excitation of the tetraquark $X_b(1^{++})$, the analogue of the X(3872) state in the charm sector.
One of the most striking quantum effects in a low temperature interacting Bose gas is superfluidity. First observed in liquid 4He, this phenomenon has been intensively studied in a variety of systems for its amazing features such as the persistence o
f superflows and the quantization of the angular momentum of vortices. The achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) in dilute atomic gases provided an exceptional opportunity to observe and study superfluidity in an extremely clean and controlled environment. In the solid state, Bose-Einstein condensation of exciton polaritons has now been reported several times. Polaritons are strongly interacting light-matter quasi-particles, naturally occurring in semiconductor microcavities in the strong coupling regime and constitute a very interesting example of composite bosons. Even though pioneering experiments have recently addressed the propagation of a fluid of coherent polaritons, still no conclusive evidence is yet available of its superfluid nature. In the present Letter, we report the observation of spontaneous formation of pinned quantised vortices in the Bose-condensed phase of a polariton fluid by means of phase and amplitude imaging. Theoretical insight into the possible origin of such vortices is presented in terms of a generalised Gross-Pitaevskii equation. The implications of our observations concerning the superfluid nature of the non-equilibrium polariton fluid are finally discussed.
Positivity restrains the allowed domains for pairs or triples of spin observables in polarised reactions. Various domain shapes in ${1over2}+{1over2}to{1over2}+{1over2}$ reactions are displayed. Some methods to determine these domains are mentioned a
nd a new one based on the anticommutation between two observables is presented.
